


Gestures of Worship

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Drama, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:56:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a bloody day, Bull and Dorian count the cost, muse on the problem of heroes, and lend a helping hand, both in their way.</p><p>Or: near misses, Dorian's hands, comfort sex, pillow talk, literary devices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gestures of Worship

**Author's Note:**

> Reports of my death have in fact been greatly exaggerated. I'm still in the fandom, I'm still writing. Please have some drama with a side of life-affirming smut.
> 
> Thanks go out to: Toft, who is a scholar and a gentleperson, and patiently talked me through most of this, and Jasper, who gave a final and highly appreciated blessing.

Dorian whisks water from his hands and dries them on a square of rough linen. His ruined shirt and gloves are tossed over a nearby bench, along with his perhaps salvageable vambraces. The water in the washbasin swirls pink and cloudy, disturbed by his fingers. Someone will toss it out, once the bustle around the improvised infirmary ceases.

With a hissed breath, he tips the washbasin from its stand. The water rushes out in a brief milky tide, sluicing into the mud of the courtyard. The rain churns the newborn puddle into ripples. He shrugs his vest back on over the thin undershirt.

His hair has long since been plastered to his scalp, so he doesn't bother with his hood as he steps out from under the loggia. Soldiers and horses throng the front of the infirmary, situated in the south wing of the villa. The villa, in turn, crowns one of the many abandoned estates on the Exalted Plains. The Inquisition claimed the building a week ago: water-logged banners at the gates declare this precarious occupation.

They've already had to defend the claim. Dorian steers clear of a scout that dashes past him to catch a soldier, the latter teetering astride her mount, her leg a ruin of red under her ragged breeches. She bleeds a smattered path across the tesserae of the loggia floor as the scout hauls her inside.

The villa is an old, handsome affair, lissome hunting hounds racing in the floor mosaic at the heels of a green-clad chevalier. In better weather, the sun would light the broad windows like paintings. The columns run glossy with rain that masks the subtle scrollwork upon them.

 _Who were you?_ Dorian looks down at the knight at his feet: lofted in his stirrups, his arrow seeking the heart of a target. Gallant, silent, frozen. A lionised ancestor, perhaps, or a hero out of a high-wrought romance.

A sliver of red is caught under his nail. He scrubs it off on his cloak.

"Out, now," says a harried voice behind him by the doorway. "There's beds for your company in the north wing. Be back in the morning if the pain doesn't settle overnight."

"Yeah, thanks." Bull ducks away from the surgeon before she removes him by sheer force of will. Dorian feels the prickling phantom of merriment, but it doesn't reach his face. Bull's armour is stripped to his waist, and bruises mark his left shoulder, deep enough to show against the grey skin.

His breathing sounds clear. Dorian can live with the bruises.

"Feeling better?"

"Thought you'd gone inside." Bull eyes Dorian's soaked hair, clearly uncaring of the rain spattering his own skin.

"Contrary to what I may posit now and then, I will hardly melt. It's an inconvenience, not an impediment." Dorian frowns. "That looks like a remarkably half-done job."

"The shoulder? I'm not gonna complain of some bruises when there's people coming in whose guts are held in by their cuirasses. They've only got one healer."

 _One mage_ , is what Bull means, and Dorian has to nod acquiescence. "Rest it is then. Let's hope the beds are somewhat tolerable."

"It's a step up from roughing it." Neither of them had the chance to glance at the accommodations yet: their party were due to resupply at the outpost, only to arrive in the middle of a raid by the Freemen.

The Inquisition has made gains, but their standing here is far from secure. Dorian worries the flesh of his palm with his other hand, then stops. They won the day. Bull stands beside him.

"I'll come up later," Dorian says, past Bull's shoulder. "Ease my mind and rest, will you?"

"Since you ask so nicely," Bull says, but where Dorian's voice strains towards a blithe cadence, his is hushed with a question.

Dorian doesn't let him ask. Dropping his hands to rest at his sides, he turns away, past the wounded still staggering in.

*

The same mosaicist has been at work in the villa baths, Dorian notes. They, too, are occupied: two apprentice surgeons are boiling bloody linens in the cauldrons normally reserved for bathwater. Dorian accepts his lot—a bucket of warm water and a ladle. He retreats beside a scene of the same chevalier in green, greeting a group of wispy spirit figures by a frothing lake.

He wonders if they granted the knight any insight. All he finds is a state of marginally greater cleanliness, though it is a relief to pull on dry clothes afterwards. He settles for a shirt and breeches, the belt with his knife and belt pouches buckled over them.

Lavellan doesn't mind his state of dress. She's in the middle of a furious letter to whoever passes as the local leader of the Freemen. Assuming she can find them, Dorian says in a moment of realism, and fills her wine goblet for her.

Supper goes like that: the two of them exchanging weary snippets of conversation in between bites of food. Cole has drifted off into the infirmary, to do what he does, to scrape sleep from the eyes of the surgeons so they can save one more, to take the pain of the dying so they go gently. Bull does seem to be resting.

While Lavellan drafts withering—if likely doomed—diplomacy, Dorian eats his overcooked pottage and drifts, himself. The serene, stylised silhouette of the chevalier clings to his mind. 

Seen now from a distance, his departure from Tevinter appears hazy, like the opening verses of minstrel's tale. Did he picture himself as a knight-errant of sorts, striving for the mountaintop that would let him touch the sundered heavens, or for the holy relic that'd lend him wisdom on how to mend his homeland? Was there a love, to be found along the way? Did he think to wield words to attain his goals, or to reach them by fire and force?

*

He tells himself it is habit that draws him up to Bull's door at last. Habit, or the gnaw of some unsated fancy—travelling through the fractious region hardly let them sleep at night, let alone find privacy for less essential needs.

Not that Dorian means to accost Bull in his convalescence. He knocks, then clasps his hands behind his back. The knuckles of his left hand dent the palm of his right one.

"Hey," Bull says, answering the door himself, and lets Dorian duck inside around him. The room may have been a study once: a half-empty bookshelf and a notched desk sit along one wall. An oak-framed bed is shored up in the windowside corner. Judging by the hollow in the piled-up pillows, Bull just got up.

"You sound..." Dorian weighs the word. "Surprised, perhaps."

"Maybe." In the light of the candles on the desk, the bruises fade into Bull's skin. The only cue is in the gingerly way that he sits back onto the bed.

"Surprised that I'm here?" Dorian turns the only chair in the room so it faces the bed.

"It was a hard day. Wouldn't blame you for turning in early."

Bull's pack and axe lie at the foot of the bed, but Dorian would've expected him to have spread some tools around the room: whittling knife or whetstone, or at least ink and vellum. His hands are so seldom idle.

Dorian has seldom understood that like he does now.

"I was thinking I might help," he says, "with your shoulder."

"You helped already, by my reckoning." Bull's voice tarries, not quite apace with the moment, before he shrugs, one-sided. "You sure you're not tapped out?"

"I sat down and ate a questionable meal," Dorian says, with a sartorial air. "Creating some heat won't make me fall over."

"What about spitting fire?" The jest is more fond than spiny, and so Dorian lets it slip.

The bed isn't large, but it accommodates Bull laid on his back and Dorian leaning over him, his ankles crossed. The continuing rain rattles the windowpanes, the candles casting runnels of gold upon the streaming glass. Dorian unscrews the lid from the jar fished from his belt pouch: a salve of embrium and spindleweed. It gradually lets up the peculiar peaty tang of the latter herb, as he warms it in his cupped palms.

He presses his salve-smoothed, spell-warmed hands onto the bruises, waiting for Bull's breath to hitch and then even out as he adjusts to the sensation. The movement of air into Bull's lungs and out again has the sound of a prayer, or a poem, recited low somewhere just out of hearing.

Dorian finds the lines of tightening muscles one by one. His fingers tease out the incipient kinks, loosen the strain, stroke out the rawest of the hurts. It's not a thing he believes himself to be talented in, relief, and yet relief is what he now feels.

A better use for his hands. The untroubled flow of Bull's deep breaths.

"That's better," Bull says, low and unprompted, as Dorian sweeps a last slow circle across the front of his shoulder. His flattened hand looks a muted copper against the silver stain of Bull's skin. "Pity they won't scar."

"They're _bruises_." Now. Now they're bruises.

"I guess it wasn't that memorable a way to get hurt," Bull agrees. Then, with a glint of merriment, "I've had worse tumbles, too."

Dorian groans, unpolished and helplessly amused. "I think I can live without knowing some things about you. Please don't share."

"Only if you ask." Bull lies with his head and horns half buried in the pillows, heavy, quiescent. Dorian knows how he can sharpen like a dwarven spyglass, all his meticulous focus brought to bear on a task. The lassitude is a poignant, welcome contrast.

Some of it is finally seeping into Dorian himself. He reaches back to put the lid on the salve jar. Bull reaches out to brush his elbow.

"What's the plan? You staying?" A commonplace question, a casual touch. It was only necessity that kept them apart on the journey here.

"For what?" The thought slides away from Dorian and into words too soon. "I mean," he says, hastily, "that you presently have one fully functional arm. This is all emollient, not curative, if we must get into the nit and grit."

"So I feel good now but I'll regret it in the morning," Bull says, and the serenity of his tone makes laughter burst from Dorian's throat.

"Yes, that is it. In the Common."

"Smartass." It sounds like something softer. "If you ask me, you need a break."

"The fact of your terrible tumble doesn't preclude the possibility of a better one?" Bull's fingertips skim Dorian's mouth. He allows himself to lean into the cant of Bull's hand. "I don't know that I should let you up from the bed."

That rouses a rumbling chuckle from Bull. "Or you just wanna be on top."

Something flutters in Dorian's throat. "Perhaps. I may also be feeling gracious." He kisses the second knuckle of Bull's forefinger. In his lap, his own hands untwist themselves from one another. "You can decide how."

*

Like this: Candle smoke and spindleweed on the tongue, the rustle of feathers and grain hulls in the pillows under Bull's back. They shunt aside only what clothes they must; Dorian opens Bull's belt, kicks off his own boots and breeches. Bull frees Dorian's supple leather belt and slips the knife and the pouches from it.

"Your hands have been busy enough. Give 'em a rest," Bull says, his lips against Dorian's knuckles. Dorian uncurls two fingers to let Bull suck them into his mouth, wordless, wanting. "Close your eyes."

This is Bull looping him in, focusing the moment like shifting delicate lenses, wrapping the belt around his wrists until they're secure behind his back. The wound is knit. The day is done. Dorian lifts a knee over Bull's lap at his prompting and sighs at the long smooth caress of Bull's hand down his cock and then in between his spread thighs.

 _Please_ —it's not at Bull that he thinks this, not yet. _Let me have this. Let me have him._

He sinks onto Bull's cock in a single, sustained plunge. Bull's hand frames one hip, constricting his movement to low, rolling glides. It's not a gentle position: he has no leverage but his knees and toes, his hands snugly bound.

It's not gentleness that Dorian needs now.

Muscles straining, eyes cinched shut, he stirs at Bull's unspoken demand. This, here, is real. The rumpled bed and Bull's steadfast grip. Here he is both lover and beloved, though they don't speak such words to one another. Here is Bull, alive, saved by Dorian's blood-drenched hands.

The stories never speak of that part. How death is. How easy it comes. He cannot forget, but he can put it away.

Bull lets him rise on a sharp crest, then drags him down until there's no space left between them, until Dorian trembles, filled to the brim. Pleasure can be such a quiet thing. He is poured full, a still and shining feeling, held steady.

Scrambling forward best as he can, Dorian fumbles for Bull. His mouth meets stubbled jaw and a straining laugh.

"Easy," Bull mutters, but it is a broken sound.

The kiss cracks the moment like an impact. Dorian moans into Bull's mouth— _please, please, oh, let me_. Bull holds his head against his good shoulder as light blooms behind his eyes and he spills into orgasm.

*

Dorian has come to appreciate the slow unfolding after sex: the moments of lying together, grasping again that one is more than skin and nerve and sensation. Underneath him, separated by Dorian's rucked shirt, Bull settles. Out of drowsy courtesy, Dorian lets himself drop into the narrow space left on Bull's right. Bull sighs, turning his cheek against the messy thatch of Dorian's hair.

"There's a story in this house," Dorian says, floating on the quiet.

"Many, I figure," Bull murmurs. "You thinking of a particular one?"

"Yes. Maybe. It isn't as if there's anyone left to ask." Perhaps, if they can make peace, the household will return. Until then, the chevalier in green will journey silent on their walls and floors, bound on his unknown errand. "It makes me wonder, that's all."

"I know the boss has people looking through the records they left. The owner's name should be in there somewhere."

"It's—that isn't quite the object of my curiosity," Dorian admits. "How do you imagine posterity will remember us, a generation from now?"

Bull curls his arm under Dorian's shoulder, gathering him in. The rain chills the house, no matter that the spring is already courting summer. "I'm not much of a chronicler. Varric will jot something down, if we live long enough for that."

"Better him than some high-handed Tevinter scholar. Though parts of our misadventures might serve as fodder for the minstrels."

"Casting yourself in a leading role already?"

"Naturally." Dorian wriggles his fingers. The candles throw their skittish shadows against the cracked daub of the wall. "A young, dashing pariah on a quest for redemption. That is practically a cliché. If I were true to form, I'd return home like a dutiful son. The southerners would all be of dubious moral character, except perhaps the unlikely Orlesian knight I befriended on my travels."

"Someone I should know about?" Bull interrupts, laughter wafting in his voice, but Dorian hears—or thinks he hears—a more sombre strain there, as well.

"No," he says. "That is, there's no real person. But this—if there were a love story, one I might be a part of, it'd be like this. A boon companion, who'd face every danger beside me. We might exchange a longing glance or three. Nothing would be said outright, of course."

"I've heard a few like this. Took me a while to get all the devices."

"I am," Dorian says, genuine, "oddly delighted by the idea of you studying our romance narratives in smoky tavern corners."

"All the bits on filial duty and loyalty were actually pretty homey." Bull turns his head, his voice tilting upwards. "Our heroic sacrifices are a lot more low-key, though. None of that confessing your feelings as one of you has a punctured organ."

Dorian's breath punches out of him. He scampers up, tension winding up every limb. Bull means, of course he means, a ridiculous, repeated motif of verse and prose alike. For a moment all Dorian can see is Bull falling off the rampart and onto the scree below. The Freeman with the hatchet and shield leaping after him.

Then his own hands, up to the elbow in blood and viscera, palms throbbing with the echo of necrotic energy.

Then Bull, turning Dorian's face towards his own in the dim candlelight. The rain has dwindled into spitting gusts against the glass. Dorian sets a hand on Bull's chest, remembers the bruises, and shifts it onto his shoulder.

"Sorry," Bull says. "Bad bit of imagery."

He landed shoulder-first, and Lavellan feared the impact had sent a rib into a lung. Dorian shakes his head hard.

"Not one of your best, I have to say." His voice is too soft for vexation.

"Come here." Dorian might protest that he couldn't be much closer to Bull in any way that wouldn't veer into the carnal. He doesn't. Bull looks at him, earnest, waiting.

Tugging off his shirt, Dorian leans into Bull properly. It feels like a threshold, this cautious press of their skin together until their mouths meet and fit. Dorian tucks his hands under Bull's head and holds him still to be kissed. It is apology and atonement, wound together too tight to be unravelled.

 _I killed a man for you today. With a spell to his neck. I'd do it again._ It's an oath for a chevalier. A templar, a soldier, a bodyguard.

Bull's mouth moves against Dorian's in a string of kisses, one lacing into the next. They could lie here and pretend that this is all there is, the bed an island on dreaming waters. A story they tell in the catch of Bull's fingers in Dorian's hair, or the wet imprints of Dorian's mouth on Bull's knuckles, a moment later.

Desire sneaks into their lazy study of one another, more full and vibrant than the first time. They both already skate against the hem of sleep; the want is a swell, not a spike. Dorian presses tender, querying fingers into Bull's hip.

Still, surprise snags at him when Bull says, thickly, "Fuck me."

It isn't often that Bull asks so plainly for anything. That lights Dorian up as much as the prospect itself. "You're sure, given the arm?"

"Sure as I live." Bull pulls him down, kisses him with raw, ungentle purpose. "Figure it out, hero of this story."

Dorian smiles, hazy with want, sharp with intent, and nods.

This is what they never told Dorian, in the stories: Bull lies stretched out under him, the candles pouring hollows of light and shadow over both their skin. His hurt shoulder is braced on the pillows, the arm slack but for the occasional clutch of fingers against a surge of feeling. Dorian buries his head between Bull's shoulder blades as he moves in him. Breathes him, imbibes him, understands that he will not care for the minstrels.

There's Bull's heart under his ear like the renewed rush of the rain. There are the short, hoarse barks of his breath, the clutch of his muscles, the heat of his skin.

Let them say what they want.

This, this will never be told. Dorian's finger scrabble on Bull's shoulder. Bull takes his seeking hand, enfolding it in his own, and perhaps that is where it belongs.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank the great musical love of my youth for the title (even in translation).
> 
> Comments are very welcome!


End file.
